David Frum in The Atlantic re: Acid Rain and "the grand policy experiment":
... The Reagan administration resisted any rapid response to the problem. Congress had funded a 10-year study back in 1980—why rush to costly action until the study was complete? Taking action meant tangling with Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who assumed leadership of the Senate majority after the election of 1986. West Virginia coal was especially packed with sulfur; new standards might put West Virginia miners out of work.
And there the matter stood when George H. W. Bush assumed the presidency in 1989. Bush cared intensely about the Canadian relationship. Bush’s first presidential trip outside the United States took him to Ottawa, in February 1989. On that visit, the 41st president committed to address the acid-rain problem.
Bush’s task was eased by Senate Democrats, who elbowed Byrd out of the majority-leader job that same year. The new Senate leader, George Mitchell, represented Maine, a state that suffered especially badly from acid rain.
The result was an important amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1990, and a new U.S.-Canada air-quality agreement in 1991. Over the next two decades, U.S. emissions of sulfur dioxide would tumble by 67 percent.
True to Bush’s conservative principles, the reduction was not achieved by government command-and-control, but by a market-friendly system: cap-and-trade. The government would set a steadily decreasing maximum permissible limit on total emissions. Underneath that cap, individual firms could buy and sell pollution rights. Those firms that could most easily and efficiently reduce their emissions would set the pace, incentivized by profits from selling their pollution rights to less innovative competitors.
North American lakes are still recovering from the damage done by pre-1990 acid rain. And, of course, acid rain has not been eliminated, only very substantially reduced. But still, that reduction is a success story. And it’s a success story that showed the way to other environmental possibilities, including the ultimate challenge: a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.
But what George H. W. Bush proved 28 years ago was that progress can be achieved—and that a market-oriented Republican can head that progress, in a way consistent with market principles. He debunked the “It’s not harmful” and “If it is harmful, it’s not man-made” excuses from self-interested groups and their hired mouthpieces.
Along the way, he demonstrated a commitment to mutually beneficial partnership with America’s neighbors and friends.
All these things were done before. They can be done again. George H. W. Bush showed us how. Let that be remembered when he is lowered into the earth he did so much to protect and restore.
